i a need some advice from you. i am beginner in perl. most of the my work is releated to oralce and perl only. how can i improve my skill in perl scripting.

I thought I'd throw this one out to the forum so others could chime in:

My Perl Bookshelf:

"Programming Perl", Larry Wall, et. al., O'Rielly -- This is the standard Perl reference. "Perl Cookbook", Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, O'Rielly -- An incredibly helpful book for beginning and intermediate Perl programmers. The "recipies" in this cookbook have saved me weeks of research and experimentation over the years. "Effective Perl Programming", Joseph Hall and Randal Schwartz, Addison Westley -- This book is for intermediate Perl programmers or experienced programmers who are new to Perl. It provides intelligent guidance towards writing better, more "idiomatic" Perl. "Object-oriented Perl", by Damian Conway, Manning -- This, now somewhat dated, book is still the classic Perl OO reference.

Aside from this short list of books, you need to learn to love perldoc. I learned Perl database programming by studying the perldocs for DBI and DBIx::Class.

And, last but not least, Google and the forums are your friends.

Comments?

UPDATE:

O'Rielly also publishes "Programming the Perl DBI". I haven't read it. Has anyone else found it useful?

There are a number of other books I could recommend, but then we start moving to the specialty topics, such as Tk or graphics programming.

One resource you missed is CPAN. A little researching on CPAN prior to posting questions in a forum can often provide more fruitful/detailed info than what we normally give.

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how can i improve my skill in ...

My response would be; the key to improving is doing, not asking.

All to often I find questions that ask us to provide a fully tested/debugged solution without the person putting in any effort into working out the problem. Most of my knowledge, in the early days, came from figuring out those solutions.

Of course, if everyone took that type of approach, then there would be little need for forums such as this, since everyone would be figuring it out on their own.

So true. You remind me of the time I took a Windows MFC course (don't ask why) at Cal extension. The class was really struggling to wrap their heads around the Model-view-controller paradigm and the huge set of classes and macros involved, and someone asked the teacher how the heck we were supposed to understand all of this. I will never forget his reply: "with great Human suffering".

Yeah I think Larry and Fish both hit this one really good. When I need to know more about how some aspect of perl works I always search google for "<perlfunc> example". Though I can learn much from books for me seeing peoples examples of working code put to practical use helps the most.